RedNote, Post-Election Crypto, Carter

RedNote

If you want to make something extremely popular, ban it!

One of the most popular apps in the US, TikTok, is scheduled to be banned as early as Sunday. According to Polymarket, as of Wednesday evening, there is a 72% probability that TikTok will be banned by May. The premise of the ban is simple. Don’t allow Chinese companies to control the algorithms that serve content to US citizens. Furthermore, Instagram, Google, and other US apps are banned in China, so why not reciprocate?

As a result, a Chinese alternative to TikTok called RedNote is now the #1 app in the US. Users are diversifying their Chinese app consumption in response to the potential ban by downloading other Chinese apps. There is no way to win this fight. The internet is like water, it will always find the cracks. It’s also interesting because this trend is quickly onboarding huge numbers of US citizens into primarily Chinese social networks, creating unique mixes of people who would otherwise never interact. This has implications for China, which will now have to determine how to monitor and censor the flood of US users who fundamentally value free speech and likely have very different experiences and views regarding certain rights and freedoms.

Post Election Crypto

It was well understood going into the election that a Trump victory would be good for Bitcoin. Trump successfully campaigned at the major crypto conferences leading up to the election, so much so that friends would tell me the Bitcoin conferences had turned into primarily conservative rallies. Trump famously surprised even himself when he said to a crowd that he would fire Gary Gensler in his first week of office and was met with an extended roaring standing ovation.

SEC chair Gary Gensler is universally disliked by the crypto community for many reasons, but to put it in very even-keeled terms, Gary’s SEC was negligent in its responsibility to regulate crypto markets. At best, they did not provide any guidance. At worst, they actively conspired to weaken the crypto industry.

As a result of the end of Gensler’s SEC, a surprising post-election winner is Ripple (XRP), which is now the third largest crypto asset behind Bitcoin and Ethereum.

If Ripple (XRP) sounds generally irrelevant or not something you’ve heard of before or for a long time, that’s because it has been out of the spotlight for over a decade. It was founded in 2012 and has since been surpassed by Ethereum and Solana, which are generally considered the 2nd and 3rd most important crypto assets behind Bitcoin. Before the election, Ripple had a market cap of $30B vs $182B today. At this market cap, it’s now on par with major publicly traded US companies like Adobe or Goldman Sachs. If allowed in the S&P 500, it would be within the top 50 names. Don’t take this as hype or a recommendation; that’s just the current state, and I wanted to highlight it because it has surprised most people, even the ones who pay close attention to crypto.

There are many reasons to write off Ripple entirely, and many people within crypto will tell you that it has no relevance whatsoever. The price disagrees and tells a different story, for now at least. Ripple’s primary focus and function is to provide payment rails for cross-border transactions for banks, corporations and people. Its ultimate goal is to establish itself as the backbone of the global financial system. This is something to think about considering the next four years are politically supportive for crypto.

President Carter

In my 2025 Outlook article, I mentioned how President Reagan launched the venture capital industry. For context, I was talking about how perceived vs. actual risk is often misunderstood; people often misclassify prudent investments as risky either because they are mistakenly too risk-averse or because they are simply unfamiliar with the asset. A good friend pointed out that while venture capital grew significantly under Reagan, it was actually President Carter who passed the key amendments to the prudent man rule that laid the groundwork for President Regan. These changes helped reclassify venture investing as prudent rather than risky. RIP President Jimmy Carter.